DOLLS' debut, still Secretly Sulking since 2008…

The Ramblings Of A Mad (Wo)man.

Seriously concerned about my own sanity when in cleaning up several months’ paperwork detritus I find a single sheet of paper, which for some reason has a left and right column, starts on the right (perfectly spaced & centered, I might add) and continues upside down on the left.

Here’s a little teaser into my brain-waves, which I’m quite certain was written when I was completely sober, as the handwriting is perfect. Weirdness.

So – MOMS are being portrayed in the UK media as being the long-suffering butt of the joke while children ape and try to emulate their “cool dads”, whereas in North America, the easy, breezy, beautiful and ever-calm mother in mass media manages to handle daily life effortlessly and with a constant supply of clever quips to realign her crazy-but-I-guess-that’s-just-kids kids, the job, the dopey, dumpy-but-loveable husband.

Is there some correlation between some media-dictated proprietal feelings of British women over British men? The women we read about in every single UK magazine consistently highlight the fear/potential danger in losing “our man” to another woman (and yet are full of tabloid-style first-person confessions of fucking the mail-boy at the office Christmas do), while North American mags seem to concentrate more on the individual woman’s failings – and how she can better attract a man, how she can be more feminine by sporting the fashions that the readers themselves write in to denounce as being too “haute-couture” for daily work wear, and yet in the same breath align themselves in “loving the magazine” with these unwearable fashions, these indicators of their consistent failings, entirely desperate simply to define themselves as demonstrably more stylish in the mere purchase of such magazines, ones that, as they judge their unstylish colleagues and neighbors, allow them to feel above the common denominator in which they sit.

Think about it – it’s the “being seen carrying your starbucks cup” VS “dunkin’ donuts” of magazines. Starbucks is still laughing because people define themselves by aligning themselves with the branding – it says, typically, “I have the status level to wait a million hours in line for a soy-pumpkin-spiced-half-fat-fucking-latte, spend 6$ on it, and everybody knows it.” We know this, we’re all in a shit economy and yet people don’t destroy a carefully calculated built-by-purchase image by spending the $1.50 for a regular coffee, as, heaven forbid someone think you don’t live in a suitably gentrified neighborhood, a world without Starbucks. Same goes for holding the right newspaper, magazine, blah blah blah whatever. I don’t actually give a shit what people do, what coffee they drink, what magazines they read, but it just seems to me that in North America, people care a lot more about dumb shit like this, and yet they are simultaneously so over attuned to political correctness that dictates how society relates to itself and to other societies — but they buy into the bullshit more than anyone else, buying into what gives them issues in the first place, whereas in Britain there seems to be more of a “Well, we’re all of us, none of us perfect, so fuck it.” I’ve never seen such lax gender-related political correctness (between the two countries, that is) than in the general society over here. It really makes me realize how massively conservative we are in North America, comparatively. We North Americans think we are so liberal next to stuffy, over-polite Britons, but men and women barely make eye contact for fear of lawsuits in the New World, and Britain is full of newspapers with chicks with their tits out and public drinking on the tube. Perception is still 9/10ths of the law, I guess.

While on a weekend trip to the highlands of Scotland (no offence, but not the ideal winter minibreak), I accidentally purchased a teen magazine — the purchase being incited by the free crap that came with it, which usually seals the deal on magazine purchasing for me. Idiotic consumer that I am, I managed to disacknowledge the kiddy-type font and instead engaging my interest fully and completely in shiny plastic wrapping and free lip glosses. In opening the magazine, amid full-gloss closeup facial shots of Justin Beiber (now THAT’s a catchphrase!) were the multiple hearkenings to the youth of the UK to beacons of brimming overinsecurities.

My boyfriend was with me at the time and by all accounts being one of the more patient, interesting and evolved heterosexual men I know, was the first to be quizzed in relation to the content of this magazine, which was itself simply a series of quizzes, quizZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzes, that would indicate when you will get a boyfriend, what kind of boyfriend he will be, what kind of girl a boy like that would like, how could you be more like the girl the boy wants so you could have a boyfriend etc etc etc, held together with poorly photoshopped advertisements featuring 30-year-olds playing teenagers in some made-for-TV-movie of an alcohol-free dinner party at TK MAXX.

….. And that’s IT. There’s no conclusion, just ramble ramble ramble.

I think I would have been less comfortable posting something so pointless had it not been mildly and marginally articulate and had the idea of having written this complete RANT in such an awkward and delirious sleepwalking fashion not been so insane and whatnot. Mayhaps when the men in the white coats come and get me they’ll cite this lunacy – the type of rant that normally appears on handwritten placards taped to the inside of random phonebooths.